I found this story pretty interesting, but I still don't know what it is. A science story? The author, M. Mitchell Waldrop, is a science writer. A management one? It's published by Business 2.0. Or is it just entertaining? You'll judge by yourselves.
Take a sip of coffee. Say hello to a colleague.
Congratulations: You're a regular Jack Welch. If your brain were a gigantic corporation, its CEO would have just carried out an astonishing display of management skill. Those two simple everyday acts, neuroscientists tell us, are considerably more complicated than the supervision of a big company like General Electric which boasts more than 300,000 employees in 14 business units spread across 100 countries. That's nothing compared with the human brain, which has a staff of about 100 billion nerve cells shuffling countless messages to one another. It also has separate divisions for vision, hearing, movement, touch, and smell, at least two departments for language processing, a variety of committees for recognizing faces, and a working group for social relations.
Your brain is the ultimate example of a complex, decentralized organization. And because we (usually) behave coherently, smoothly integrating new circumstances as they arise, the brain is also the epitome of an adaptive organization, a learning organization, a shared-vision organization -- in short, the ideal modern company.
From this, M. Mitchell Waldrop gives us five rules of management we should learn from how our brains are working.
The first rule is: "Never try to micromanage a large, complex organization."
The reality is that your conscious decisions and experiences represent only the tiniest fraction of what's actually going on in your brain. Before you can take that sip of morning coffee, for example, your motor cortex has to do a phenomenal amount of subconscious planning and coordination just to move your hand toward the cup. Before you can greet your colleague, your vision centers have to do an equally incredible amount of subconscious information processing just to recognize her face.
There's not enough executive attention in the world to micromanage this level of activity. And that's why the brain has evolved to carry out such processes far below the level of consciousness, using the equivalent of "standard operating procedures." Some of these procedures are subroutines that have been hardwired into the brain since birth, like our ability to see color. Abilities such as reading and walking are so thoroughly practiced that they might as well be hardwired. Either way, they allow us to conduct most of our daily routines on autopilot. But that doesn't mean that a sprawling enterprise can actually manage itself.
Please read the full article if you want to know about the four other rules.
Source: M. Mitchell Waldrop, Business 2.0, October 2002
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